


Error: Soulmate Not Found

by King of Novices (mykonos)



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Depressing Themes, Guaranteed Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, Longing, M/M, Rebirth, Soulmates, Yearning, read with caution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 01:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2210220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mykonos/pseuds/King%20of%20Novices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two past lovers are reincarnated into a lifetime in which they never get to meet. </p><p>You live on this Earth for a day. Maybe less. Leonardo is one of those who live but for a few moments. </p><p>He is weak and spends his life in a hospital dreaming of Ezio and drawing him. When he dies young, an exhibition is held in his honor and when Claudia drags Ezio there speaking about the guy that looks like him, Ezio doesn't expect his life to shatter into pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Error: Soulmate Not Found

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing gift fics for my birthday and this is the last prompt I promised to fill.

You know what's the best feeling in the world?

When each day your pen strikes another point from your list of dreams. And you start chasing another.

Leonardo lives in dreams because he can't have a life on his own. 

Sickness and frailty have visited him at a young age and decided never to leave.

You live on this Earth for a day. Maybe less. Leonardo is one of those who live but for a few moments. He hurries to live them to the best of his abilities, and his abilities are many. Many were constrained by having been bound to a hospital bed for years. Leonardo doesn't try to make sense of why it's him who has to endure this endless suffering. Making sense of a mad world would cause even the sharpest mind to bend.

His short childhood was devoid of calamities, until his poor father died. He doesn't remember having a mother. He knows enough to remember some miniscule details about his father, the meekness of his rough face, the calluses of his caring hands as he carried Leonardo to bed on cool summer nights, and nothing much besides. He left him with just enough savings to begin his schooling in art and pay the bills of his treatment when it replaced schooling. He doesn't remember his father and it pains him deeply because the man provided him with the safety of a warm bed and warm food during his last years of life.

Some spare money he had Leonardo squirreled away on drawing supplies that Rosa sneaked into the hospital and into the safety of his lonely little room. The few visitors he's had over the years include Rosa, Antonio and some doctors, and a couple of itinerary patients that had floated into this room either on their own free will or someone else's. 

Rosa is his nurse, and though other come and go Rosa remains his only friend. But for her assistance, he would be helpless and bereft of supplies, one of the reasons for which Leonardo has bequeathed all his worldly possessions unto her without her knowledge. Antonio, the head of this wing, connives at Rosa's mischief, less because of his sympathies for Leonardo and more because of his fondness of Rosa's indomitable spirit. Leonardo finds her presence agreeable. She is one of those strong and fearless women men rarely know how to handle, with a free and untamed spirit that holds only peculiar things dear, as Rosa holds Leonardo dear to her heart.

Antonio also connives at her leaving the lights on during the night, on Leonardo's behalf and implicit request (because he doesn't want to cause her trouble, but she recognizes when Leonardo wants to spend the night drawing). He needs time to draw, every breath he draws takes him closer to the inevitable.

His life is just a road to death.

Drawing is what alleviates his suffering.

It makes him happy. _Happy_ is an unfortunate and misleading word, perhaps _content_ would be a better choice. An acceptance of the absurd ways of life. He can view them as good or rotten, but it's just the way it is, and it's absurd. 

Leonardo sighs, lightly to not upset his aching lungs, and puts his charcoal to paper to correct a perfect scar, clutches at the remnants of the dark piece to try and relieve suffering through drawing, but he soon falters under a sudden onslaught of physical pain.

The scar already is finished, as is his drawing, another dream to strike from his list.

He stares into the comely face of Ezio, a youthful look wrought with careless mischief and innocence that befits a young man, not Ezio's older version riddled with wrinkles and pain of a profound knowledge as in some of his earlier drawings where Ezio is a man long past his mid-age. Leonardo traces along the length of his scar running at the side of his shapely mouth, a hint of a smile resting on his own face in the wake of torrential waves of pain.

On his face Leonardo has no scars. On his heart he has a thousand.

There is more work to be done and his body keeps reminding him that his end is near. There is yet _so much work_ to be done, so many unfinished sketches begging for a finish, all because the slightest shifts in Leonardo's dreams fire his imagination. And his dreams carry a burden of such delightful-and-painful monotony, the image of this one man whose beauty he fell prey to what feels like an eternity ago. 

He sometimes feels like Ezio is not just a product of his imagination, like they have met one another centuries ago in some far-removed world he now lost and is no more privy to. He has never felt such deep yearning for another human before. He never had these feelings that range from gentle affection to earnest wish to have Ezio only to himself.

When he doesn't draw, he indulges in a state of idle reverie, but his mind never parts from Ezio, or the warm hazel of his eyes, or the shirr of his heavy white regalia, the warmth of a tight clasp of bodies in an embrace, the scent of herbs under the dressing of Ezio's wounds he caters to, the freshness of old wine and new cheese brought into his studio on late evenings, or the jingle of weapons as Leonardo plucks at a white sleeve in fruitless attempt to prevent him from his future projects. All this Leonardo sees in his mind's eye, smells in his nostrils, feels on his much too pale skin.

He reclines on soft pillows and lets a new, old memory invade his senses.

It's his Ezio, becoming and charming in his state, sleeping on the cushions of his workshop, uninvited but always welcome. A loose white shirt with an unbridled thread of lace hanging below his collarbone, the shirt plucked from his breeches, some stray strands of long hair freed from the constraint of the red binding ribbon and framing the side of his comely face relaxed in the midst of deepest sleep and illuminated by a gleam of a sputtering candle.

A shuffle of feet pulls at Leonardo's conscience before he can reach out to touch the sleeping man, to feel along the vivid texture of his hair and scar, but the scene is ingrained into his memory and will remain to be so until he puts it to paper.

Next there is a scrap of wood across tiles as Rosa settles into the chair flanking the bed.

"How are you feeling?"

Leonardo doesn't open his eyes right away.

He is sitting-not-lying, his hands folded in his lap to conceal his sooty fingers, and Rosa knows he is not asleep. He is not willing enough to venture into a conversation, but he will indulge her. This decision deepens when he pries his eyes open to gaze upon her face and find distress marring her features. She looks younger than her age is willing to betray, but tonight she looks as old as the seas, worn under the lashes of worry. 

Leonardo gives her a smile devoid of amusement, watches her fight through the words that want to leave her mouth.

"Leonardo... They don't give you much time. They say you aren't fighting." Her voice is a mismatched tone glued together by necessity.

There is nothing to fight for. 

Leonardo will spare her this thought because she deserves more than that. He will let her believe that he hasn't given up yet, she is a woman unused to weakness.

There is _nothing_ to fight for.

Ezio is not real. In some other universe, maybe he is not the product of his imagination or remembrance. Rosa will mourn for him, for a time, but she too will go on with her life. No one will be there to remember him.

It's not worth fighting for humanity either. It's sad that it has a wasted potential to be better, but spends it on being ruthless. It suffices to take a look at the brutality and reflex intolerance in his very surroundings. To visit a football or boxing or hockey match and look at the audience. To walk around a dodgy neighborhood, or look at territorial graffiti, at the pushing, shoving, and posturing. To go driving anywhere and notice the honking and speeding and cutting up and threatening driving. To go to an urban pub or a village underpass. To smell the lifts in an unlit car-park. To watch the group of cheerleaders versus the outsiders. To listen to the neighbors and the bitter wife shouting at the quiet husband or the brutal husband shouting at the meek wife. To watch people killing wasps, ants, cows, sheep, lions, tigers. Humans are monsters, it's plain to see and no surprise. Even when people are bound by the same homeland, same race or gender where they don't need to attack each other, they act aggressive and get angry and bored and... human. Mean, nasty, depressingly unpleasant monsters that are cruel and disparaging for fun, not survival.

Fighting for this humanity is wasted effort.

"How much?"

"Not more than a few days."

Leonardo knows he is to die soon. Everybody dies eventually. Once you are born, you begin to die.

Still, this information is devastating to Leonardo who hoped to add more to his prolific output of art because he wants to leave behind as much as he can manage. Not of himself, but of this man he wishes to preserve for posterity as the only thread of light in this gloomy darkness of life. 

Leonardo buries his face into his sooty palms in a moment of bitter misery and despair. He will leave this world with the empty feeling of the many unresolved issues hanging in the polluted air. 

Sometimes he wants to die just to see what happens next, if there's anything better beyond. To see if Ezio will be waiting on the other side to complete what's missing.

Before he does, there is something to be finished, his last flash of memory to find embodiment on a piece of paper.

"I will prepare myself." Leonardo says, smothers his sudden haste behind his words and his urge to relish in the last moments given to him while he still has Ezio all to himself.

A painful expression flashes across Rosa's features and he immediately regrets his words. He should have offered more than acceptance, but he never obliged himself to lie, not even for a dear friendship. Rosa knows best that he had long prepared himself to be swallowed by this sickness where no drugs could help and treatments he's grown sick of can't prolong his life. She knows that he has bought for himself a humble grave plot and a small plaque to be put upon the simple gravestone saying 'Here lies one who thinketh no evil. Here lies one whose love was drawn on paper'.

She rises to leave, wordless, poor to hide what she doesn't want Leonardo to see, a sadness and pain unbecoming on a woman of her strength and alien to her character.

She leaves him in darkness probably hoping that he would try to sleep and regain the scraps of his strength. She leaves him trapped in a terrible plight where he wants to draw more with so little time left.

There are no shutters on the windows of his little room, per his request (he rises when the sun does) and he is guided by the gleam of moonshine that shines faintly through the window nearest to him. His gaze ambles across his latest drawing, across Ezio's tamed hair and cheeky smile unmarked by facial hair and stops at the warmth that is his hazel eyes.

He puts it away and takes up a new sheet from the folder resting beside his bed, fights through a blinding pain that engulfs his entire body and brings charcoal upon paper, uses the glowing remains of the dying fire of his life to finish his last drawing. If you give a dying man an inch, he will take a mile.

And so Leonardo takes the night. He doesn't sleep or eat the next day and his body wanes, wilts slowly away into his death.

His pen and charcoal don't stand idle even for a moment. He works through the reprimanding shake of heads of the doctors and through Rosa's insistent pleas. He slashes across the expanse of the paper with the fervor of a man left with a few more moments to live.

By the time he finishes, the second morning has peeked into the contents of his lonely room, and Leonardo can discern through his hazy gaze the scattered trees stripped down to skeletons by the season's wind and rain.

Leonardo smiles through the pain that has turned dull with overuse and holds his last masterpiece in the wispy hold of his weary fingers, chasing after mirages, a merry carnival and a masked face of a stranger with a familiar scar resting on a smiling mouth.

When you chase a mirage, the desert swallows you.

Leonardo closes his eyes and smiles back, and lets the desert swallow him into oblivion.

 

* * *

 

It's late autumn. A dull day.

Ezio has been in a sour mood even before he finds his hand in Claudia's, even before they find themselves amidst the swarm of people trying to enter the exhibition.

There can't be more than three rooms inside, but it's not only art that draws people here. People flock to real-life stories weighted with tragedy and circle round death like fat flies feeding on its poignancy. Ezio knows to appreciate art, but there is something rotten about the entire event, however well-intended, and his mood further deteriorates as he feels sympathies for this late artist whose work is recognized only after his death.

The two of them manage to enter only because Claudia is Rosa's friend, and as far as Ezio has gathered, it's Rosa who organized this exhibition in memory of her patient-turned-friend with the money he bequeathed to her before his death, and some money of her own thrown in.

Even after they slip inside the people keep pouring in and they fight their way through hand-in-hand to find a crowd jammed inside the first stuffy room. The halls connecting the rooms look like a swarming piazza on an exceptionally busy Sunday.

There is a strange chill to the air as Ezio takes more grudging steps forward, tugged along by his sister.

"This one first, Ezio. I _swear_ he looks like you." Claudia repeats herself in her excited steering through the crowd, bound for a destination of her choice. Her grasp is painfully tight around his fingers as they thread through to stop before the first panel, squeezed by so many bodies.

What Ezio expects to be a vague likeness or a slight resemblance turns into a mirror of himself.

His eyes flit from one drawing to another, shift from his own face to his exposed flank, or his entire body clothed in strange-but-fine outfit. In some he is hooded, in some he is frozen in mid-leap or in a tight coil of a body about to be set into motion, in some he is young as he is now, in some his forehead and mouth are wrinkled with age, but his eyes are vivid.

"Well? Was I wrong, brother?" Claudia says through the buzz of voices around them, in a voice that knows she is right, as she often is. Her other hand is on his shoulder first, then at his nape and combing through his tail affectionately as if to emphasize the striking similarity while she waits for a confirmation.

All this Ezio could have chalked up as a strange coincidence, weren't it for a drawing described as the only one with a self-portrait, and the artist's last drawing as well.

It's not the self-representation of the artist that plummets upon Ezio, it's the entirety of the scene that smites him and thrusts deep into long-forgotten memories to wring them out of his mind, and it feels like it's happened only yesterday.

The line between past and present is so very blurred for a few moments that it feels like the past is bleeding out before Ezio's very eyes.

The image immerses itself into his very soul to remind him of a time long lost, the drawing with sedulous attention to detail of a memory he never witnessed but was part of springs to life before his very eyes. He sleeps, slouched against the huddle of cushions gathered from all corners of Leonardo's workshop, the glimmer of a bare candle held by Leonardo's hand throws a flicker of light upon their faces, Ezio's is peaceful and serene, and Leonardo's smelted with affection as he leaves Ezio's dreams undisturbed. Ezio remembers waking to find a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He remembers this day but not this immortalized moment, the night after a successful assassination when he sought refuge in Leonardo's dwelling, he remembers the softness and pliancy of his pillows and the whiff of paint and wax and canvas and wine, and safe haven.

He doesn't remember Leonardo descending into the workshop, he hadn't sensed his presence that night, fast asleep as he was with his serene face now committed to paper that countless foreign eyes stare at, but he does remember Leonardo's nightshirt, delicately wrought and trimmed with lace and banded cuffs, a clean-white unmarred by paint and basking in yellow under the glimmer of his candle, often wrinkled in Ezio's fingers on many nights when their breaths mingled and their bodies melded.

Ezio's heart leaps into his throat and he is stricken with sudden terror that freezes him to the spot.

It comes to him as an epiphany.

His life, this man, this night, and many others. He stands petrified and frightened by this revelation before an all-encompassing misery banishes and outweighs any other feeling. His life is cracking at the seams.

"Ezio?" Claudia asks in a quaver, her hand still on his nape.

His life shattered by a single blow.

His lips sealed by shock.

His chest constricted while a gradual sickening sense reality dawns on him.

"He is dead." Ezio says in the most dejected and dispirited voice that has ever left his mouth.

Leonardo is dead. He died all alone. A patient in a hospital, a pale version of his former glory.

Ezio's blood curdles, the sight of Leonardo's last drawing disperses the hum of voices entirely.

They weren't even given a chance.

"Ezio?"

Claudia's grip is dogged and her face sober and undaunted by his look of dismay, but concerned, and Ezio is suddenly agog to her words. Her grip on Ezio's wrist shifts into a gentle touch and her voice into a gentle call of his name.

Ezio wants to hedge, but he can't even speak.

The exhibition is in full swing and it brings his blood to ferment. These drawings are not meant for them. Claudia wants to move him out, but Ezio balks at the very thought of budging from Leonardo's last message to him, from leaving as he had once left for Constantinople, his usually nimble mind shattered within seconds because of this one drawing.

A blinding sadness, then fury, builds up inside of him and there isn't a scintilla of rationality in him as he shoots out to steal the masterpiece hanging on the panel, to quell the sudden urge.

The panel swings and claps against the wall as Ezio spins around wildly to dart through the crowd that erupts into a sea of whispers and morphs into shouting too late, after Ezio has already found cover in a blind room, immersed in darkness and swallowing thickly to bring his beating heart to a rest, with his prized possession in the privacy of his hands at last.

Claudia finds him wedged between a dusty broom and a stack of wooden crates, and she joins without uttering a word.

Ezio wants to tell her that he wasn't stealing, that he has the right, because these are made for him, they are _his_ , and they are _him_. His gaze is tinged with guilt even when she doesn't say a word in response to his act, and she understands more than she lets on.

She doesn't harp on it.

With a stifling burning of sadness in her chest she puts her palm at the crown of his head and lowers him against her breast where he is calmed. Ezio's hair is tousled as she runs her hand across his scalp and holds him by the shoulder with the other, and Ezio holds the drawing to his chest and rides on a tide of her sympathy.

 

* * *

 

They arrive at the graveyard after a detour to a flower-shop, a feat performed by Claudia alone because Ezio has not once removed his gaze from the stolen drawing.

Together they locate the grave and together they lay down the flowers. There is no one else around. Claudia takes to removing old bouquets of wilted flowers to keep herself occupied, and to give Ezio privacy.

Upon Claudia offering no objection, he remains at the graveyard, alone.

A long hour he spends looking at Leonardo's picture, at his name engraved into the cool stone, at the years and inscription resting below. _Here lies one who thinketh no evil_. Centuries later and he hasn't changed one bit. _Here lies one whose love was drawn on paper_.

Ezio stares into the words until his eyes hurt and his heart bleeds out. Centuries, and his love hasn't ceased. Ezio holds the drawing to his body to become one with it, until misery gradually ebbs away leaving sadness and futile longing in its place. He curls up at the base of the gravestone and wraps himself flush against its coldness, this simple act of curling up near Leonardo and laying his hand to a rest across the plaque is sufficient to placate his booming heart.

But not his longing.

The sky opens up to his suffering and drizzle begins to rain down on his rankled heart. It pours over his very soul.

He can't pluck up the courage to return home that night. He can't pluck up the courage to explain to his family.

Ezio hides the drawing in his jacket and spends the night beside Leonardo, bereft of sleep and at the mercy of a crying guilt, his heart shattered and his life along with it.

 

* * *

 

 His family believes he wanders out for his usual nightly trysts with lovers and Ezio doesn't correct them.

Better they think that he whores himself out without relent than that he is dying a slow and miserable death in yearning for Leonardo. His life is, and had been, littered by mistakes, but this is not one of them.

People never bury the dead. Not really. They take the dead with them, that's the price of living.

The price Ezio pays is mounting until it grows visible to the eye.

A usually jocose man wilts at what is supposed to be the outset of his life. His eyes, weighted with trouble and lack of sleep, droop low. His cheerful expression melts into a wan look. His spirits are low and attention elsewhere. It's not a healthy life he leads. He spends days and nights at Leonardo's grave to return the affection he couldn't give while Leonardo was alive. He pines for someone long departed from the world of living until it turns into obsession, but this does nothing to impede his misery. He can't touch anyone without thinking of Leonardo. Their past lives were hostile, but this one is cruel in breaking them up in this way. Perhaps he should have never come here, to make his life easier.

Ezio tries to put a stop to it by self-initiation.

It works, and it does not.

It's a month away from Leonardo's grave spent driven by agony, and nights of disordered sleep tinged with sadness and misery only longing can devise, with nothing but Leonardo's mirage to torture his hungry heart. His back is breaking under renewed wave of pining until he gives in.

His return to the grave is marked by swinging between elation and gloom, and he spends the night until daybreak draws nigh.

No one has to know.

He can't leave off. It's his only comfort.

The second year of his visiting Leonardo's grave sees no drastic change compared to the previous one. It goes on in a tireless cycle.

It's not until much later in life that Ezio feels a longing spark for a family, for children, and he spends hours in a conflicted state of penitence before he firmly cements himself into celibacy. The necessity of life doesn't manage to put manacles on him, and whatever he has left of life he vows to spend with Leonardo, until they can meet again.

It's not until an old age that Ezio feels the first tugs of death plucking at the sleeves of his mantle. It's late autumn when he last wanders out into the graveyard, a man worn out by longing and age, condemned to a long life of wanting something he can't have.

Ezio grunts with strain as he lowers himself onto the grave and leans back against a familiar stone and rests his aching bones. He knows its coldness from winter days, knows its gentle warmth from sunshine petting across it in summer, knows every discoloration, every chipped off corner molded by weather and time. It's where his heart is, where Leonardo isn't alone, and won't be after this day either.

Ezio gazes up at the scudding clouds until they make way for the night, and toys with the grains of white pebbles strewn across the grave, summoning memory upon memory and losing himself in the want of a past life, hard as it was, but sweetened by Leonardo's presence. He keeps the drawing close to his heart, where it has always been, and threads fingers trembling with age through his brittle hair and remembers how Leonardo used to do it. They had been young then. His body had been that of an assassin, his hair had been hazel, his lips had been kissed by Leonardo's.

It's late into the night when Ezio's solitude is broken by a traveling gust of wind. He tilts his head to the side to rest his cheek against the stone, lays his cold lips upon the surface in attempt to nurse his yearning.

It's late into the night when his lips stretch into a wrinkled smile while he savors his last hours before he allows himself into the gentle clutches of death. She has long waited for him. Almost as long as Leonardo.

It's late into the night when Ezio wrings the drawing to his chest, a poor wretch lost in a desert chasing a mirage before he enters the oasis where death accepts him into her hold.

It's early morning when Claudia finds Ezio's body curled against the grave.

He is buried with the drawing.

 


End file.
